Building the Creator Economy: 2021.
Dev Protocol: a vision in 2017, building since 2018, and fair launched in 2020.
Foreword
Dev Protocol leverages Social tokens and Decentralized Finance to provide Creators with an A-Z Launchpad to capture their value. Creators, and their Patrons, can receive inflationary funding and eventually launch their own economies with their Social token all on Stakes.Social. Since Dev Protocol’s launch over $2,200,000 has been generated for the most critical Creator segment: Open Source Software developers. Special thanks to the Creators that joined us early on, the Patrons supporting valuable OSS projects, and everyone else who contributed to Dev Protocol’s growth.
2021 and onwards.
What’s Next? ⏭
Towards Community Ownership
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. -Charlie Munger
The Dev Protocol Genesis team’s highest priority is the creation of a DAO. Voting Power will be exclusive to Patrons and LPs. Dev Protocol will follow the Borda Count method to allow voters to rank their preferences when faced with multiple choices.
Dev Protocol will also offer Instant Governance, following the Borda Count method, to decide on the protocol’s parameters. With Instant Governance, once a consensus is reached the protocol’s parameters will be automatically updated with a 24 hour delay. Instant Governance will be exclusive to Patrons and LPs.
This Governance design was chosen to maximize positive feedback loops. Dev Protocol’s future will be decided by those making a better future for Creators. It also encourages Creators to become Patrons and start supporting other Creators. This will further incentivize Creators to support their dependencies.
Scaling Dev Protocol
Reducing Dev Protocol’s friction that stems from high gas fees is a high priority. By reducing gas fees Dev Protocol will realize higher onboarding rates, more Patrons, and more efficient Patronage. Therefore, a priority is scaling Dev Protocol with L2 solutions. This is only possible with the tremendous progress made by L2 scaling teams this year!
The first step is to support the transfer of DEV tokens on L2. This will allow DEV to be transacted on exchanges that support L2 with extremely low gas fees. This will make Stake Social’s onboarding and offboarding cheaper for users.
The next step is to then support Stakes Social on L2. This would allow near zero costs transactions for Creators and Patrons. So far, ZK-Rollups meets Dev Protocol’s needs with zkSync being the preferred candidate. We will follow their progress closely and update the community with a detailed plan.
New Sectors and Markets
Dev Protocol’s mission is to support all types of Creators. To provide Inflationary Funding for different Creators we’ll be implementing DIP #41 which sorts Creators by their Sector and Market. Each Sector will have its own native APY and Markets. For example, the Open Source Software Sector will have one universal APY across its Markets: Github, Gitlab, and Radicle. This design will ensure that different Creator segments won’t effect each other’s funding. If a developer wants to implement a new Sector or Market then they’ll have to build the integration and Governance will vote on whether or not to implement it.
Stakes.Social UI/UX Updates
Stakes.social is gaining significant traction over the last few weeks from the OSS community and Patrons. In March, we released the Dev Protocol Incubator which allows the Treasury to begin staking for major OSS projects to incentivize their onboarding. We expect major OSS projects and their communities to begin onboarding in Q2 of 2021. Therefore, we are doubling down on our investment to improve our products’ brand identity and UI/UX.
The UI/UX update will provide a cleaner interface and experience, focus on building relationships between Creators and Patrons, and advance blockchain beginners up the learning curve with detailed onboarding steps. We will also focus on eliminating any information asymmetry. For example, the new design will show which Creators paid the Creator fee which is sent to the Treasury. This will incentivize Patrons to support Creators that paid the fee since that’s how the protocol captures value. Check out DIP #52 that details how Creator fees should be distributed!
Integrations and Collaborations
Dev Protocol is ready for integrations and collaborations that deliver more value to Creators. We are now working with interested parties that will solidify Dev Protocol an A-Z Launchpad for Creators and their social tokens.
If you’re a team focused on social tokens, social graphs, yield aggregators, and token-gated access then reach out to us on Discord! We would love to talk to anyone building a better future for Creators and learn how to integrate your solution with Dev Protocol!
Experimental Features 🧪
Tokenize your Github account
Over the last few weeks we have received inquiries from Github users to tokenize their Github accounts instead of tokenizing a particular OSS project’s repository. This is efficient because many OSS developers single-handedly maintain multiple FOSS projects. Patrons may also want to support the career of a Creator in general than a specific project.
Mint Social Tokens Without Inflationary Funding
Dev Protocol’s current core value proposition is for Creators to receive Inflationary Funding for their work. However, there are Creators that want to explore other major advantages to having a Social token such as Utility & Governance capabilities. Dev Protocol will support these Creators by providing the functionality for them to mint and easily add Utility and Governance to their Social tokens. We will share more details on this later.
Unleashing Khaos Oracle
Dev Protocol built the Khaos Oracle to allow off-chain to on-chain confidential authentication of private keys in order to ensure ownership. Currently, the Khaos Oracle verifies that Github users own the OSS repository they are attempting to create a Social token for. Khaos Oracle has tremendous benefits for builders in the Creator Economy. This year we will explore a solution to provide Khaos to the ecosystem that also benefits the Dev Protocol ecosystem!
Long-term Vision 🔮
Dev Protocol is committed to making an A to Z Launchpad for the Creator Economy. Minting Social tokens and providing sustainable Inflationary Funding for Creators and Patrons are Dev Protocol’s first products. Dev Protocol is consistently building new products to add to our Creator Launchpad. Inflationary Funding will become the growth funnel for Dev Protocol.
As Creators advance up the learning curve, at their own pace, we will offer them more products to scale their income and audience. Creators will require scalable liquidity programs, pre-set utility, governance capabilities, and decentralized offerings for their Social tokens. All future products will be designed to create positive feedback loops for our Creators, the DEV token, and ecosystem.
